Northam creates separate school safety work group that could look at gun control
TTAG reader Chris thinks this is an attempt to end-around the legislative committee, designed to put more gun control options on the table.
As Virginia lawmakers grapple with the best way to approach student safety, Gov. Ralph Northam has created his own group to investigate the issue — and it could look at gun control.
Northam on Thursday announced the Work Group on Student Safety, a 20-person panel made up of state, local and school officials, along with some community members, that will consider ways to improve school safety.
The issue has been front and center in education since a gunman killed 17 people at a high school in Parkland, Fla., on Valentine’s Day.
The governor’s formation of his own work group comes as members of the House of Delegates continue to meet through a special committee formed by Speaker Kirk Cox, R-Colonial Heights, in the wake of the Parkland shooting.
Yorktown sheds olde light on modern gun debate
At the founding, the militia was the people . . .
Independence led to a loose confederation with myriad problems. Hamilton and Madison pushed for the 1787 convention that group-wrote the federalizing Constitution for a “more perfect union” and co-authored the Federalist Papers that greased the skids for its approval. The initial amendments were 1791 add-ons to coax ratification from the 13 wary states: Having recently won independence, they didn’t want to surrender key rights to a new central government.
“The Second Amendment has to do with concerns about the federal government controlling state militias,” says Kevin Hardwick, a colonial history professor at Virginia’s James Madison University. “Pretty much all agreed that a standing army in times of peace was a bad idea: It could be misused to put the government in a more authoritarian direction. How do you protect against this? According to the theory of the time, you rely on citizen militia, like what is now the National Guard.
“In slave states, they took this pretty seriously; they were always worried about slave insurrections. But all states had their own militia.”
In 2008, Hardwick notes, the Supreme Court affirmed in District of Columbia v. Heller that Second Amendment militia protection extends to individuals who own/use weapons lawfully for self-defense.
An Important Turning Point for the Supreme Court and Our Second Amendment
The extent of the anti-gunl left’s freak-out over Kavanaugh is a very positive sign . . .
Ten years ago, the Supreme Court, in a 5-4 decision written by the late Justice Antonin Scalia, ruled that the 2nd Amendment protected the right of individuals to have a gun for self-defense.
This ruling in District of Columbia v. Heller struck down an outrageous District of Columbia law that prohibited residents from keeping a handgun at home. It was landmark victory in support of our Constitutional freedoms and the rights of all Americans to protect themselves and their families.
However, since Heller in 2008, the Supreme Court has largely shied away from considering other important cases on gun rights. It takes the votes of four justices to hear a lower court appeal and five votes to issue a ruling. However, the suggestion has been that Justice Anthony Kennedy who has long been the key swing vote on the Court was not willing to go further on critical outstanding issues like constitutional carry and concealed carry reciprocity.
David Hogg’s Hyped Book Hit the Market with a Thud
You mean no one is interested in reading a ghost-written gun control screed by that happy-faced kid? Get outta town! . . .
A look into the book’s sales is a bit of a challenge. For one week the New York Times listed “#Never Again” on its top-10 non-fiction list, but this is a bit of a dubious source.
For one, the Times’ list is infamous for being more about editorial selections than it is for an accurate reflection of what’s popular with readers. Secondly, the paper of record does not provide actual sales figures. I combed through a few weeks of Amazon’s sellers in a few different categories, yet even on their larger top-20, the title does not appear. Likewise at Barnes & Noble.
It took the figures provided by Publishers Weekly to get a grip on this title’s fortunes. PW provides an even more expanded weekly list, as well as actual sales numbers. On its July 2 tabulation, “#Never Again made its debut on the tertiary Trade Paperback list — managing to reach the list at No. 25. By that date, the Hoggs’ book had sold a total of 3,741 copies. To offer some perspective, the top-selling book that week sold more than 60,000 copies; the top non-fiction paperback, more than 15,000 copies.
That chart result was a reflection of the Fallon appearance and other tour stops, but by the following week, the book had fallen from the list. It becomes apparent that when it came to buying into the Hogg message, few buyers have pulled the trigger.
The latest protests against the Chicago police are about more than one shooting
Oh, there’s no shortage of reasons to criticize the performance of the CPD . . .
The latest round of protests in Chicago over the police is, at face value, about the police shooting of 37-year-old Harith “Snoop” Augustus, a black barber working in the city’s South Shore neighborhood. But the demonstrations — and the anger that led to them — are really rooted in generations of criticisms against a police department that has been repeatedly found to be abusive of residents and racially discriminatory.
It’s not, then, just about this police shooting. It’s also a reaction to the 2014 police shooting of 17-year-old Laquan McDonald. It’s about the US Department of Justice investigation, released in 2017, which found that the Chicago Police Department repeatedly used excessive force and often treated people, particularly minorities, “as animals or subhuman.” And it’s the decades of incidents before that, including a scheme under which a police detective tortured hundreds of people to force confessions out of them.
This history helps explain why the department’s insistence that the shooting was justified and the video footage showing that Augustus was armed have done little to quell community skepticism and criticism.
